William Julius Wilson Quotes

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

I think in the last thirty years, the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer. It is not something that you can see with rose-colored glasses.

Income inequality has become so prevalent in the U.S. that examples of its negative impact on the middle class are as common as Kanye West saying something cringeworthy in the media.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

The gap between the rich and poor is widening fast.

The central issue of our time remains the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer.

The middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table.

We cannot continue to have the upper class wealty getting richer and richer, the middle class shrinking and 43 million living in poverty.

I agree that income disparity is the great issue of our time. It is even broader and more difficult than the civil rights issues of the 1960s. The '99 percent' is not just a slogan. The disparity in income has left the middle class with lowered, not rising, income, and the poor unable to reach the middle class.

Barack Obama destroyed the middle class. Whatever you want to say about his rhetoric, the rich got richer, but the poor got poorer, and the middle class got wiped out. That's really what Trump appealed to and inspired in the forgotten man.

If you have extremes of haves and have-nots where the gap keeps growing, the have-nots group together and create social disorder, as they can't see a way out of their situation.

The economy is not governed with the bottom half in mind.

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.

As the middle class is predated upon with an ever greater malicious intensity, their children stand to lose more and harder than their parents ever did.

The needs of the poor take priority over the desires of the rich

If you are poor today, you will always be poor. Only the rich now acquire riches.

Poverty divide not only nations but societies within nations.

The competition of the poor takes away from the reward of the rich.

No society is healthy when the gap between the rich and the poor is growing.

There is greater income inequality in the United States than in any other industrialized country. Yes, the debt is a problem that must be dealt with. To me, however, the disappearing middle class is even worse - bad for our economy and really bad for our democracy.

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

If you don't have money or you come from a background that doesn't have money, it's harder to achieve your ambition in life. It's not that you can't, but it becomes harder. Inequality is one of the worst things that can exist in our society, so I am interested in those kind of things.

Economic chasm between people is something that is of interest to me. And something that I used to write about even as a child. It's something I've revisited a few times in my writings.

Income inequity has to be addressed.